The present invention relates to blood flow velocity reconstruction from medical image, and more particularly to reconstructing a velocity field that conserves flux from medical images used to measure blood flow.
The are several available technologies, such as Phase Contrast Magnetic Resonance Imaging (PC-MRI), Cine MRI, Doppler ultrasound, and Particle Image Velocimetry, that can be used to measure flow inside of a bounded cavity, be it industrial in nature (e.g., a pipe or tank of fluid) or biological (e.g., blood flow in a blood vessel, heart, etc.). However, velocity data measured using these technologies can suffer from noise artifacts that move the velocity field out of the space of divergence free vector fields. That is, due to the noise artifacts, mass is not conserved in the measured velocity field.
Conventional techniques for velocity reconstruction from measured data essentially act as enhancement filters in order to enforce incompressibility of the given velocity field. Such filters are either global, or more commonly, have compact support given by voxel masks approximating the region of interest. However, in such conventional techniques, the reconstructed velocity is not guaranteed to conserve flux, and these techniques may not work properly for reconstructing velocity in realistic problems that may have multiple inlets or outlets.